Improving User Experience with Personalized Review Ranking and Summarization
About
Online consumer reviews are important decision-support resources in e-commerce, yet the increasing volume of reviews often creates information overload and makes it difficult for users to identify content that matches their individual preferences. Existing review-ranking approaches commonly rely on aggregate signals such as star ratings, helpfulness votes, or recency, which may not reflect user-specific interests. This paper proposes a personalized review ranking and summarization framework that integrates user preference modeling, hybrid sentiment estimation, aspect-level review matching, and Large Language Model (LLM)-based summarization. The framework first extracts aspect-level preferences and sentiment signals from historical reviews. It then incorporates user-selected product aspects and written review input to build a personalized user profile. Candidate reviews are ranked by comparing this profile with review-level aspect and sentiment representations. The top-ranked reviews are then summarized to provide concise, preference-aligned information. The proposed method was evaluated using an Amazon Mobile Electronics review dataset and a structured user study involving 70 participants across common consumer electronics categories. Results show that the proposed ranking method outperformed random ordering, star-rating-based ranking, helpfulness-vote ranking, recency-based ranking, and semantic-similarity-based ranking. User-study results further indicate improvements in satisfaction, perceived relevance, decision-making confidence, ease of finding information, and reading efficiency. The findings suggest that combining aspect-level personalization, sentiment-aware ranking, and LLM-based summarization can reduce review overload and support more efficient user-centered decision-making.